How to Be Healthy by Choosing the Right Food?

Although it accounts for only 2% of your total body weight, the fact remains that the brain is a food-hungry organ with ten times the appetite of other organs. In order to function, it uses up a minimum of 20% of your daily calorie in-take. In addition to calories, you should also make sure you get good nutrients for your neurons through a balanced and varied diet. To ensure your brain gets what it needs there are certain foods you should add to your diet. 1. Oily fish (mackerel, sardines salmon…) for brain maintenance More than 50% of brain mass is made up of lipids, and over 70% of these are fatty acids that belong to the well-known Omega 3 group. These fats are crucial to the production and maintenance of brain cells, preserving the fluidity of cell membrane.

They also play a part in neuron activity. Weakening brain function and memory trouble can often be traced back to a deficiency in Omega 31. Oily fish are one of the best sources of Omega 3, but if fish isn't to your taste, consider nut oils and rapeseed oil as equally rich alternatives.

2. Pulses (lentils, chick-peas...) for brain energyThe brain is said to be glucose-dependent, which means it uses only glucose to function. It consumes more than 5g an hour, but doesn’t know how to store it. It therefore has to be regularly supplied your diet via the circulatory system. It has long been proven that the most difficult task within intellectual performance, the capacity to memorise, depends on the level of glucose in the blood2.

But beware of indulging in sugary foods and confectionery; though easy to snack on, they can lead to such strong fluctuations that your system can react violently and reduce blood sugar to below its normal level. The brain cannot tolerate this and the drop in blood sugar leads to fatigue and a shorter attention span. The sugars that are said to be ‘complex’ and which have a low Glycaemic Index (GI) are therefore crucial. Pulses are rich in these ‘complex’ sugars, and their GI is...

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

...What can be done?
Instead of assuming that people not eating healthy just lack the right nutritional information or lack willpower and motivation, better appreciation of their stressful and busy lifestyle might offer more effective solutions.
A healthy eating plan for busy people needs to be easy-to-start and easy-to-follow. If a fast-food eater's brain -- due to plasticity -- has been trained to crave unhealthy foods, re-training of the brain of the compulsive eater or unhealthy eater will have to be done. This seems complicated, but it is not. It requires some understanding of brain plasticity and implementation of smarter solutions to re-train the brain in order to break bad eating habits and develop healthier habits.
Once a healthy eating plan has been chosen, taking action and continued practice can make the new healthy eating habit permanent. This process may take more time, but the healthy-eating changes can be sustainable long-term.
These are healthy eating guidelines for busy people:
1. Make healthy eating changes easy-to-start. Instead of going 'cold turkey' and attempting to quit eating super-sized fast-food meals rapidly, one can make simple, sustainable changes to one's unhealthy diet slowly.
For example, people eating super-sized fast foods often can start by eating one less...

...﻿
How Does Eating Healthy Affect Your Life?
You already know healthy eating can have a positive impact on your life, but just how far do these benefits extend? Evidence suggests regularly eating healthy, well-balanced meals contributes to sustained weight maintenance, a better mood, increased energy levels, positive inspiration to others and the potential for a heightened quality of life.
Weight Maintenance
Following a healthy eating plan -- one which emphasizes many fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy products and lean proteins, as well as low levels of saturated and trans fats and low cholesterol, sodium and sugar -- contributes to weight maintenance. Staying within your recommended daily calorie intake and eating moderately sized meals also helps you maintain a healthy weight throughout your life. A healthy weight is linked to a reduced risk of many debilitating, chronic diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as improved self-esteem and mental state. Maintaining a healthy weight is also linked to a lower incidence of depression, meaning healthy eating can help significantly improve the quality of your life.
Mood
Healthy eating can have a positive impact on your life by leading to a more sustained elevated mood. According to Susan Biali, M.D., in "Psychology Today," a...

...Specific Purpose: “To inform my audience about how to eat healthy.”
Central Idea: In this speech, I’ll be explaining why it is important to eat healthy, and give tips on what to do to initiate healthier eating habits.
Introduction:
Attention Getter: How many of you want to be healthy?
Credibility Material: My mom is a dietitian; which is a person who specializes in the study of food and nutrition in relation to health, and she’s always stressing to my brother and I to eat up vegetables and to eat fruit everyday.
Relevance to the Audience: Almost everybody knows that it's important to eat healthy. However, not everybody can explain exactly why. Healthy eating is essential for a number of reasons, and not all of them are as obvious as "getting your vitamins."
Preview of Main points: Why pay attention to what you eat? Is healthy eating the same as going on a diet? How to eat to be healthy?
Link: First off…
I. Why pay attention to what you eat?
A. Healthy eating is one of the best things you can do to prevent and control many health problems, such as Obesity, Heart Disease, High Blood Pressure, Type 2 Diabetes, &amp; Some types of cancer.
1) According to the Centers for Disease Control &amp; Prevention, about one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) are...

...Goal: How to gain weight eating healthyfood?
I want to improve my physical wellness by gaining weight while staying healthy.
Behavior Strategy:
I. Gather data on what type of food is fattening, but in a healthy way.
II. Get help from a nutritionist to make sure I eat healthyfoods, but that will also make me gain weight.
III. Make a schedule / meal plan to make sure I get more than enough calories on a daily basis.
IV. I make a goal for myself to gain ten pounds in six months.
Journal Articles
Article 1: “What to Eat to Gain weight-The healthy Way”
In Glamour magazine, I found this article “What to Eat to Gain Weight—The Healthy Way”. This article shows how a person can improve her life style eating healthier, but still gaining weight. One of Glamour’s fashion interns, Ashley, tried a new diet with the help of Rachel Beller, a nutritionist. Rachel looked at her daily choices of food, and made a schedule for Rachel to improve her diet to eat healthier, but still intake enough calories to gain weight.
Ashley will change all her daily habits, and adopt a whole new diet rich in proteins and carbohydrates. Rachel Beller said that Ashley has the right approach in order to gain weight, because she eats three meals and two snacks a day, which is exactly what to do in order...

...Title: Food to Die for
Nutrition is a nourishing organic process by which an organism assimilates food and uses it for growth and maintenance. Good nutrition can help prevent disease and promote health. Consumption of important fruits and vegetables ensures lower level of mortality and reduces various degenerative diseases, for instance, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and immune dysfunction in several human cohorts. In addition to the vitamins and minerals found in fruits and vegetables, may contribute to these beneficially protective effects.
Food is significant factor to the maintenance, development, functioning and reproduction of life. During lifetime an individual consumes 30 tons of food on average in seemingly endless dietary varieties. According to De Vries (1997), however, digestion splits all the foods found in all this variety of diets into the same basic nutrients. Food, therefore, is chemistry, and the mixture of chemicals that are represented and divided into four basic categories: (1) nutrients; (2) non-nutritive naturally occurring components (including antinutritives2 and natural toxins); (3) man-made contaminants; and (4) additives. At that, the nutrients account for more than 99.9% of the food contents. The main classes of nutrients are: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and vitamins, and minerals. The constituents of food are called...

...The Healthy Eating Pyramid is a simple, trustworthy guide to choosing a healthy diet. Its foundation isdaily exercise and weight control, since these two related elements strongly influence your chances of staying healthy. The Healthy Eating Pyramid builds from there, showing that you should eat more foods from the bottom part of the pyramid (vegetables, whole grains) and less from the top (red meat, refined grains, potatoes, sugary drinks, and salt).
When it’s time for dinner, most of us eat off of a plate. So think of the new Healthy Eating Plate as blueprint for a typical meal: Fill half your plate with produce—colorful vegetables, the more varied the better, and fruits. (Remember, potatoes and French fries don’t count as vegetables!) Save a quarter of your plate for whole grains. A healthy source of protein, such as fish, poultry, beans, or nuts, can make up the rest. The glass bottle is a reminder to use healthy oils, like olive and canola, in cooking, on salad, and at the table. Complete your meal with a cup of water, or if you like, tea or coffee with little or no sugar (not the milk or other dairy products that the USDA’s MyPlate recommends; limit milk/dairy products to one to two servings per day). And that figure scampering across the bottom of the placemat? It’s your reminder that staying active is half of the secret to weight control....

...What is high sugar and what is low sugar? Both are the same. There is not much difference between the two. We will now see why it is so.
For example, let us say that there are 500 units of sugar in the food that a person eats. Let us assume that out of these 500, 100 become good sugars and 400 become bad sugars during the digestion. These 500 sugars mix in the blood. Let us assume that there is no stored glycogen available in his body.
What will happen now? The 100 good sugars will get insulin and enter into the cells. The 400 bad sugars will not get insulin and go out through the urine. Adrenal gland will search for glycogen. Since glycogen is not available, it will not be able to supply sufficient glucose to the cells. Since sufficient sugar is not supplied, the cells will starve and the person will faint.
Now, if we test sugar level in this person’s blood, the level will be low. Doctors will say that he fainted because of low sugar. But, in reality, he did not faint due to low sugar. He fainted because there was no glycogen available in his body.
Let us now consider another example. 100 good sugars in the blood have gone into the cells. But the 400 bad sugars are still present in the blood and have not yet gone out as urine through the urinary bladder. At this point of time, the person faints due to the reason that there is no glycogen in his body when his cells needed sugar.
If you test his blood for sugar, the sugar level will be high due to the...